Lebanon's Lost Modernist

By

Richard Holledge

April 29, 2013 9:48 a.m. ET

IN THE LATE 1940S, an aspiring Lebanese artist, Saloua Raouda Choucair, arrived in Paris to soak up the city's bracing postwar art scene. She worked with the abstract artist
Fernand Léger
and she studied the architecture of Le Corbusier.

Returning to her homeland in 1951, she produced abstract sculptures and paintings that combined some of those Western lessons with the principles of Islamic art with which she had grown up and added her own unique interpretation.

Had she stayed in Paris it is likely her reputation would have been assured, but, instead, her distinctive voice went largely unrecognized; she was rarely given the opportunity to hold exhibitions and sold very little.

But now an exhibition at London's Tate Modern aims to demonstrate that she was an important figure in the history of modernism—perhaps the first abstract modern artist in Lebanon and even the Arab world.

There's something painfully poignant about this moment of acclamation. Once a forceful feminist who brooked no argument, Ms. Choucair is too old at 97 and too infirm to fully appreciate that, at last, the international recognition she so deserved—and craved—has been accorded her.

Her tragedy is that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a woman when female artists were rare; a Druze, which meant she was ostracized by those of other faiths; and she was caught up in the violence that beset Beirut between 1975-90, as a painting on display, ripped by a bomb that blasted the family home, testifies.

Furthermore, as the show's curator,
Jessica Morgan,
points out, her art didn't fit into the Lebanese cultural establishment's desire for a modern art that referenced Lebanese tradition with subjects such as landscapes that could clearly be rooted in a particular place or a moment. At an exhibition in Paris, the Lebanese ambassador to France said disparagingly: "Your work is curious, Miss Raouda. Have you not done any Lebanese work for us?"

But as her daughter,
Hala Schoukair,
who has dedicated much of her life to run the foundation that nurtures her mother's work, says: "She was an avant-garde who was inspired by the principles of Islamic art, but without any visual references to what people were accustomed to seeing in that art. There was no correlation to calligraphy or Arab-esque patterns. Her style is pure abstraction of form and line, just like a mathematical equation. Therefore my mother was often misunderstood, pushed aside, ignored, and left to be on her own."

Ms. Morgan, who knew little, if anything, about Ms. Choucair, says: "I came across her work by happenstance when I was in Beirut visiting a gallery and on a shelf was this quite remarkable sculpture. I went to her apartment, which was an incredible experience because everything—her work from the last five or six decades—was there."

The exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings and sculptures and reveals a technique that used a fascinating combination of mathematics, science and architecture. She would divide her paintings into squares, halving and quartering, before working and she used a similar technique with her sculptures which she made out of stone, plastic and fiber glass and on which she concentrated from the 1960s. Her most characteristic sculptures are her interlocking units such as "Infinite Structure" (1963-65), which can be taken apart to leave individual pieces standing alone. They are a direct reference to Islamic Sufi poetry in which every stanza is considered a unique entity.

"People did not really understand her art," says her daughter, for whom the exhibition is a "bittersweet" moment: "But she kept on fighting and believing totally in her work. It was like a mission. Later she won some respect, which helped heal some of her wounds, but her ambition was much greater than that. She could not realize all her dreams."

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